Everything that's easy is easy because enough people did it the hard way, so that the process became smooth

Full flexibilitiy is usually killing the plug and play feeling which you expect from UX optimized mass products. On the other hand technical creativity is offered with these kind of open source solutions. I think both own their place. What has changed compared to prior times: Today it is very easy and cheap to integrate sensors, displays, to generate dashboards, send mails or forward data... 😀